website/docs/proto/faq.mdx
We wanted to keep with the space theme, and spent quite some time digging through Wikipedia and ultimately landed on the page for protostar (this is why our logo's a star). We really liked the definition of protostar, as it basically means "the beginning phase of a star". Even the the prefix proto means "first" or "earliest form of".
This was great as that's the impression we had in mind for our tool. proto is the first piece required for setting up your developer environment. The toolchain is the first layer in the foundation.
From an aesthetic standpoint, proto's typography works well with moon, as most of the letters are circle shaped. Double points for proto having two o's like the other products!
Nah.
A tool in the context of proto is either a language, dependency/package manager (typically for a language), or third-party CLI. The tool is something that can be downloaded and installed by version onto a machine.
Furthermore, a tool should have a primary executable file that can be executed with proto run or
through proto's shims. Additionally, a tool can also provide secondary executable files. For
example, npm (the primary) also provides npx and node-gyp (secondaries).
A backend is a special type of tool that provides additional integration with 3rd-party plugins, greatly expanding what can be installed and managed with proto.
A plugin is a WASM (or JSON, TOML, YAML) file for a tool or backend.
The terms tool and plugin are often used interchangeably, but plugin primarily refers to the WASM portion of a tool, while tool refers to the entire package: metadata, business logic, branding, so on an so forth.
Yes! We'd love to support as many as possible, and if you'd like to help, join our Discord community! Feel free to create a plugin in the mean time.
No, we will only support languages, dependency managers, and CLIs, which should be enough. However, you can create a plugin to support other kinds of tools.
As of version 0.45, we do! Simple pass --build to proto install. However, building from source
is a complicated process and is unique per tool, so not all tools support it.
Once a tool has been installed with canary, the canary version can be explicitly referenced using
our version detection rules. The easiest approach is to prefix the shim with an
environment variable:
$ PROTO_BUN_VERSION=canary bun ./index.ts
Or to explicitly configure the version in .prototools:
bun = "canary"
proto makes a lot of HTTP requests, for information such as available versions/releases, and for downloading the blobs/archives themselves. Because of this, we do our best to support all kinds of internet connections, proxy and intranet usage, and more, through the following:
~/.proto/cache/requests based on the
HTTP cache semantics and relevant RFCs.~/.netrc if it exists.[settings.offline].[settings.http].When a tool is executed, we validate the version to ensure it's correct. We achieve this by making network requests to a remote service to gather the list of valid versions. If you're having network issues, or the request is timing out, you can bypass these checks with the following:
Pass a fully-qualified version as an environment variable. The version must be installed for this to work.
PROTO_NODE_VERSION=20.0.0 node --version
If executing a Node.js package manager, you'll need to set versions for both Node.js and the
manager. This is required since manager's execute node processes under the hood.
PROTO_NODE_VERSION=20.0.0 PROTO_NPM_VERSION=10.0.0 npm --version
Pass the PROTO_BYPASS_VERSION_CHECK environment variable. This will bypass the network request
to load versions, but does not bypass other requests. However, this is typically enough.
PROTO_BYPASS_VERSION_CHECK=1 node --version